The Future of Media and the Web

Paul Jones, director of ibiblio.org, will be the chair of The Future of Media and the Web panel at the FutureWeb conference in Raleigh, N.C.

Chair: Paul Jones, founder and director of ibiblio.org, a site that is home to one of the largest collections of freely available information, including software, music, literature, art, history, science, politics and cultural studies.

Panel description: Newspapers cut staff to the bone as advertising and circulation declines, radio centralized and nearly collapsed, television’s move to HD moved even stragglers to cable. There is plenty of news on the Web – for now – but as we see the world of news changing at this very moment, we ask: Who will be the reporters? Who will we pay and how will we pay them? What will they tell us? And how will we use or view that news? Data visualization, datamining, storytelling, crowdsourcing and citizen journalism offer some directions and models but none of those are yet stable and trusted. One journalism school announced that all of its students must learn Flash, another touts social network studies, another is teaching programming to reporters, a news organization issues video cameras to former print journalists. What are the most sustainable futures? The panel will aim to specifically isolate the key challenges and opportunities in the looming future for the media and the Web and it will work to identify some specific action steps that can be taken today to work for a better tomorrow.

Panelists:

Penny Muse Abernathy

Penny Muse Abernathy, Knight Chair in Journalism and Digital Media Economics at the University of North Carolina. She is a former New York Times and Wall Street Journal executive and writer, with more than 30 years experience as a reporter, editor and media executive. She currently serves on the advisory boards for UNC-Chapel Hill and Columbia University and was inducted into the N.C. Journalism Hall of Fame in 1998.

Click here to watch Abernathy speak about the future of newspapers on FOXBusiness

Michael Clemente

Michael Clemente, senior vice president of news for FOX News and former senior executive producer of the ABC Digital Media Group (2006-09), where he served as the executive producer of ABCNews.com and ABC News Now. During his 27 years at ABC News, he also held the positions of senior broadcast producer for 20/20, and executive news producer of ABC’s breaking news specials. Prior to working at ABC, Clemente spent two years at CNN, where he oversaw all live and breaking news coverage out of Washington and helped boost the popularity of signature talk shows such as Crossfire, Reliable Sources and Inside Politics.

Dan Conover

Dan Conover has spent 20 years in the daily news business, with experience as a reporter, editor, videographer, blogger and Web administrator. He has won numerous journalism awards, including South Carolina’s Journalist of the Year in 2005 and multiple North Carolina Press Association awards for investigative reporting. Since 2008 he has taken up writing and speaking about media futurism, and is a semantic technology consultant with Chicago-based e-Me Ventures. He blogs at Xark, tweets as @xarker and a collection of his writing on media futures can be found at http://www.danconover.com/ideas/new-media.

Doc Searls

Doc Searls, Berkman Center Fellow at Harvard and senior editor for the Linux Journal. Searls is a journalist with experience in print, radio and Internet. He also has professional experience in marketing, PR and advertising. Searls was selected as one of the 100 Most Influential People in IT by eWeek and is an open source guy and co-author of “The Cluetrian Manifesto,” a Web site that was adapted into a best-selling book in 2000.

general manager for News Over Wireless. Matheny focuses on strategic media applications, where he is engaged with mobile wireless content delivery. News Over Wireless works with more than 150 local
broadcasters and wireless phone carriers, including AT&T, Sprint and Verizon, to provide news and information on mobile phones. He is active in the Academy of Digital Television Pioneers, the Advanced Television Systems Committee, Mobile Marketing Association, the Open Mobile Video Coalition, and he was a 2007 American Marshall Memorial Fellow.